“Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.”

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

Make something beautiful of your life.

When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.

I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.

You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.

What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.